That’s true in so many situations. Like for home security systems, the sign on the lawn is (I think) the valuable part. The thief isn’t going to bother if your neighbor has no such sign. Forget the multi-thousand-dollar system installation. Just buy the sign on eBay. I’m willing to bet it’s just as effective.
In the house I grew up in, we had a neighbour who put that ‘break detection’ foil tape on all his lower windows. The kind that used to be needed with security systems in the 1980s. My dad asked, “oh, did you put in a security system?” and the neighbour said, “no, the tape isn’t hooked up. It’s just so the thief will rob your house instead”. We all laughed about that for years (and neither house ever got broken into anyway).
I suppose there is a certain amount of door-lock picking done by spies or police. But the only scenario that comes to mind, where padlocks are concerned, is that teenagers use them and other teenagers try to pick them for fun.
This is nothing new. My house was broken into when I was a kid and the thieves just smashed a window on the door then realized it was the kind that uses a key from the inside. Then they smashed the window on a different door and found the same problem. So they smashed a window and discovered it had heavy furniture in front of it, so they smashed a fourth window and finally made off with our VCR and CD player.
None of the neighbors saw or heard a thing.
The cops eventually caught them two states away, apparently they were hitting a dozen houses a day for over two months before their luck finally ran out. People greatly overestimate the need for stealth.
